Above all, I could confirm that this fowl was in fact a new breed. Rosner was enraptured; he absolutely insisted on naming it after me: Alectura venatoris. I had a hard time dissuading him. After all, despite everything, I had tricked the good man. However, one of the anarch’s emoluments is that he is distinguished for things that he has done on the side or that go against his grain.” Eumeswil...
Bruno withdrew from the field of history more resolutely than Vigo; that is why I prefer the former’s retrospect but the latter’s prospect. As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously – at least not nihilistically, but rather as a border guard in no man’s land, who sharpens his eyes and ears between the tides. Eumeswil, Page 87-88 COMMENTARYManuel...
“Incidentally, prior to setting up my bunker on the Sus, I studied construction plans that Captain Ross had found among the Eskimos of New North Wales. A basic theme for the anarch is how man, left to his own devices, can defy superior forces – whether state, society, or the elements – by making use of their rules without submitting to them. ‘It is strange,’ Sir William Parry wrote when...
“Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered”. Eumeswil, Page 67 COMMENTARYThe anarch in Ernst Jünger´s conception is not against authority, as the anarchist is. Certainly, he does not...
Playing the gentleman here would be possible only for actors; nor would anyone consider doing it anymore. Rather, people, such as my genitor and my brother, feel like martyrs. Half of Eumeswil is inhabited by types who have suffered for an idea or at least claim to have done so. They stood true to the flag, offered heroic resistance – in short, the worn-out military claptrap has reawakened. Upon...
When in the course of my work at the Luminar, I was reviewing public law, from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond, I thought of an Anglo Saxon’s axiom about human equality. He seeks it not in the ever-changing distribution of power and means, but in a constant: the fact that anyone can kill anyone else. This is a platitude, albeit reduced to a striking formula. The possibility of killing someone...
The anarch differs from the anarchist in that he has a very pronounced sense of the rules. Insofar as and to the extent that he observes them, he feels exempt from thinking. This is consistent with normal behavior: everyone who boards a train rolls over bridges and through tunnels that engineers have devised for him and on which a hundred thousand hands have labored. This does not darken the...
Today, May Day 2008, we came across a relevant passage in Eumeswil, which happily also deals with the anarch/anarchist contrast we want to clarify at this early stage in our discussion. Martin Venator, Jünger´s model anarch in this book, is discussing political changes in a prelude to the following quotation, in particular the overthrows of governments that happen periodically in the state of...
“It is no coincidence that precisely when things started going downhill with the gods, politics gained its bliss-making character.There would be no reason for objecting to this, since the gods, too were not exactly fair.But at least people saw temples instead of termite architecture.Bliss is drawing closer; it is no longer in the afterlife, it will come, though not momentarily, sooner or...
Martin Venator, or Manuel, the protagonist and exemplary anarch of Ernst Jünger’s novel Eumeswil often compares his own attitude and conduct with that of his father and brother. Both relatives are historians like Martin, but neither are anarchs. In the following passage, Jünger contrasts Martin’s attitude to public and personal opinion with his father’s, in order to illustrate the intellectual...
Here is a particularly rich quotation from Ernst Jünger´s novel Eumeswil to continue the exposition of the anarch which we began here and continued here. In this quote, Jünger further explains the anarch’s role within society, his relationship to other individuals, to personal freedom, and to authority and external causes. “I tend to distinguish between other people’s opinions of me and my own...
Last week’s post ended by introducing the anarchist as someone who is not anarchic, in contrast to the free human being who is. Now we continue with two quotes which provide an explicit comparison and contrast of anarch and anarchist as conceived by Jünger. The monarch and the historian are also brought into the comparison for illustrative reasons. “If I were an anarchist and nothing...
An immediate concern of a blog with anarch in its title is to establish the fundamental differences in political, social, psychological and metaphysical terms between the anarch in Ernst Jünger’s sense and the anarchist as commonly understood. These difference are also an important aspect of defining the anarch. Although the fully conceived figure is first and most comprehensively presented...
